Wisdom is not the product of schooling
but the lifelong attempt to acquire it.
- Albert Einstein
Innovative Media in Support of Distributed Intelligence and
Lifelong Learning
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
L3D Meeting, October 19, 2005
<< IEEE International Workshop on Wireless and Mobile Technologies in
Education — WMTE 2005>>
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
WMTE 2005
 IEEE Int'l Workshop Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education
o Nov. 28 – 30 @ The University of Tokushima
 Keynote
Gerhard Fischer
Innovative Media in Support
of Distributed Intelligence
and Lifelong Learning
Claire O'Malley (Learning Sciences Research Institute, U of Nottingham)
... application of psychological theories and
methods to the design and use of CSCL
environments ... EU Projects including
MobiLearn...
Ken Sakamura
(U of Tokyo & Ubiquitous ID Center)
Ubiquitous Computing
Technologies for
Ubiquitous Learning
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Ken Sakamura (some projects related to WMT)
 TRON Project (Distributed Computing, Real-time operating system)
- ITRON widely used as an OS for Japanese mobile phones
 Tokyo University Digital Museum
- Museum heavily armed with WMT technologies: using PDA, HMD, RFID,
Barcodes, Laser pointer & photo sensor, social virtual reality, ...
 Intelligent House of the Future (with Toyota)
 Ubiquitous ID Center
- Standardization of RFID
(beyond supply-chain
management)
- Pilot tests (w/ strong
government support)
- In Kobe, Ueno, Aomori, etc.:
many RFID tags/sensors
embedded in the pavement,
sidewalks, street furniture
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Overview
 Basic Message or Basic Question
 Education in the 21st Century
 Lifelong Learning and Distributed Intelligence
 Challenges for WMTE
 Conceptual Frameworks
 Application Systems
 Reflections
 Conclusions
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
The Basic Message or Basic Question
 Wireless and Mobile Technologies in Education: what is the true value
added?
 approaches:
- gift-wrapping: technology as add-on to existing practices
- techno-determinism: technology dictates educational concerns
- our approach: co-evolution based on
learning / working / education = f {media}  new socio-technical
environments
 opportunities:
- new levels of distributed intelligence (tools for learning  tools for living)
- human attention (information  “the right information at the right time, in the
right place, in the right way to the right person”)
- basic skills in the 21s t century (knowledge in the head  knowledge in
the world)  what really means “learning”, “knowing”, “understanding” in the
world of today and of the future
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Being Educated?
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Learning / Working / Education = f {media} — In the Old Days
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Today
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Learning / Working / Education = f {media} — In the Old Days
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Today
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Education of the Future — A Lifelong Learning Perspective
 basic assumption: If the world of working and living relies on collaboration,
creativity, definition and framing of problems, dealing with uncertainty,
change, and distributed cognition — then education needs to prepare
students for meaningful and productive lives in such a world
 objective: education from a lifelong learning perspective should
- help learners enhance their abilities to learn
- engage in meaningful activities
- promote new civic discourses, since a major role for new technologies is not
to deliver predigested information but to provide for social debate and
discussion
- exploit the power of media
 goal: wireless and mobile technologies can be valuable for lifelong learning
- by offering learning opportunities at all times and at all locations
- by redrawing the borderline between knowledge in the head and knowledge
in the world
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Education of the Future — A Distributed Intelligence Perspective
claim: human cognition has
been seen as existing solely
“inside” a person’s head, and
studies on cognition have
often disregarded the physical
and social surroundings in
which cognition takes place
question: does this statue
convey the “right” imagine?
(“The Thinker” by Auguste
Rodin)
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Human-centric Perspective and Co-Evolution
—
the importance of usage and activity rather than technologies
 Who is using the computer? — learners, teachers, skilled professionals,
technically sophisticated users, domain workers
 What are they doing? — moving through space, accessing information,
engaging in informed participation and collaborative knowledge construction,
communicating with others, participating in collaborative design activities
 Where are they doing it? — in classrooms, in their work environments
 When are they are able to do it? — at any time without major preparations
or setup
 Why are they doing it? — a self-directed and self-motivated activity, an
assigned task, to obtain information
 How do they it? — in a tool-rich environment, in their heads
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Tools for Learning
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Tools for Living
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Tools for Living  Tools for Learning
 tools for living (such as eyeglasses) are grounded in a distributed
intelligence perspective, in which intelligence is mediated by tools for
achieving activities that would be error prone, challenging, or impossible to
achieve
 tools for learning (such as training wheels) are grounded in a “scaffolding
with fading” perspective in which the ultimate goal is autonomous
performance by people without tools
 a possibility provided by WMT: Tools for living rely on the presence of the
tools at all times, and wireless and mobile technologies can therefore make
them more relevant because we can rely on them at all times.
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Planning and Situated Action
----------------- learning “ahead” ------------------------ learning in context -----------
time
show a person in a room
reading a book or in front of
a computer
out in the world with a PDA
world-as-imagined
prediction
planning
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
world-as-experienced
reality
situated action
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Context Awareness
—
Information Delivery in Large Software Reuse Repositories and
High-Functionality Applications
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Human Attention — the Scarce Resource
Herbert Simon (Nobel Prize Winner) in “Sciences of the Artificial”
 claims
- a design representation suitable to a world in which the scarce factor is
information may be exactly the wrong one for a world in which the scarce
factor is attention
- the critical component in information sharing is not information per se, but
human attention
- “What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of
its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention,
and a need to allocate efficiently among the overabundance of information
sources that might consume it.”
example:
- some crisis in the world  many messages to the State Department
- printing capacity was identified at the limiting factor  buy high speed printers
- the real bottleneck: time and attention of the human decision makers who
had to use the incoming information  the real challenge: filters, intelligent
summarizing, …
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
The Right Information at the Right Time, in the Right Place,
in the Right Way to the Right Person
 right information: relevant to the task at hand  task modeling
 right time: intrusiveness (pull versus push)
 right place: location-aware cell phone (noisy environment versus movie
theatre), smart tour guides
 right way: multimodal presentation (textual, visual, auditory, tactile)
 right person: taking background knowledge and interests of specific users
into account  user modeling, “who do I ask and who do I tell”
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Distributed Intelligence and Lifelong Learning
—
Conceptual Frameworks
 Intelligence Augmentation (IA) rather than on Artificial Intelligence (AI) by
empowering human beings rather than replacing them
 providing support not only to individuals but to groups and communities,
and thereby exploiting the power of social creativity based on informed
participation
 contextualizing generic systems to person- and task-specific environments
to account for a "universe of one" by supporting meta-design,
customization, and end-user development
 transcending "gift-wrapping" and "techno-determinism" as isolated and
one-sided design objectives for new media by pursuing co-evolution
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Gift-Wrapping: Adding Technology to Existing Practice
“There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently
that which should not be done at all.” — Peter Drucker
current practice (e.g., education)
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
current practice wrapped in technology
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Techno-Determinism
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Learning and Media: Rethinking, Reinventing, and Redesign
Theory and Practice
current practice
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
computer-supported and computer–mediated
practice of the future
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Co-Evolution: Beyond “Technology-Driven Developments”
and “Gift-Wrapping”
learning, working
and
collaboration
new learning
organizations
new media and
new technologies
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Distributed Intelligence and Lifelong Learning
—
WMT based Application Systems
 going small: socio-technical environments supported by personalized,
portable devices and wireless communication that afford information and
communication between people as they move around in the world —
Mobility-for-All / MAPS / LifeLine
 going large: large computational tables that allow people from diverse
backgrounds to access, contribute to, and interact with information in an
inherently social manner to support collaborative work among others in
shared physical locations —Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory
 going everywhere: smart physical objects that communicate with
computational environments, allow for context-aware information delivery,
and create articulate environments — the QueryLens system
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Going Small: Human-Centered Public Transportation Systems
 Mobility-for-All
 MAPS — creating scripts for WMTs
 LifeLine — socio-technical environments
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
MAPS Script Editor
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
MAPS Handheld Prompter
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
LifeLine
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Going Large: Envisionment and Discovery Collaboratory
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Going Everywhere: Query Lens
Smart Physical Objects
Media
Server
Query
Server
RFID
Object identification
Access & Contribution
Articulation & Sharing
Information Needs
User identification
Gerhard Fischer and Shin'ichi Konomi
Distributed mobile databases
with bi-directional synchronization
Context-aware
information delivery
The ‘right’ information at
the ‘right’ time in the ‘right’
way to the ‘right’ users
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Reflections: Privacy
 problem of isolation
- How can we avoid decontextualized information delivery?
- Knowing about users' preferences and tasks
 problem of the world without privacy
- at the intellectual level, individuals need to process the information that is
constantly bombarding them, information that cannot be processed while they are
still "on the go"
 boundary control (rather than isolation)
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Reflections: Innovating Innovation
 looking 10 years in the future
1994 ------------------------------------- 2004 ---------------------------------------- 2014
WWW becomes
Business, Education, Collaboration
available
have fundamentally changed
WMTE technologies become
widely available
???????
 innovating innovation (John Seely Brown)
- our ideas of innovation have gone stale  be innovative in the area of
innovation itself
- will WMT be a “disruptive innovation” (= something that actually changes
social practices: the way we live, work and learn  beyond “gift-wrapping”)
 challenges associated with disruptive innovation:
- it is not technology per se that matters, but technology-in-use
- shift the discourse: from a concern about who has access to new information
technologies  who will have the knowledge to design, create, invent, and
use the technologies enhancing human lives
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
The Challenge for WMTE: Beyond Technology
 question: what is the magnitude of a change?
-
oral  literal society
printing press
digital media
World Wide Web (WWW)
WMTE
 new divisions of labor
 redefinition of the unique human role in socio-technical environments
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005
Conclusions
 WMTE: it is not simply a technology challenge
 the biggest problem in the field of WMTE is an imagination crisis of exciting
things to do, of understanding the trade-offs (opportunities and pitfalls
 the future is not out there to be “discovered” — it has to be invented and
designed and not only
- by info-enthusiasts, based on techno-determinism
- by limiting ourselves to gift-wrapping
 looking ahead: predicting the future
“This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it
is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.” —Winston Churchill
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L3D Talk, Oct 2005